One day in 1796, a 25-year-old Bavarian playwright named Aloys Senefelder was in his Workshop polishing a limestone plate when his mother burst into the room. She urged him to write a laundry list for the washerwoman who was waiting to collect their linen. “The matter would not admit of delay,” Senefelder later recounted. Finding himself “without a drop of ink [or] the smallest slip of paper”, he hastily wrote the list directly on to the stone he had been working on using a grease pencil, thinking he would copy it down later when he had paper and ink.

For months, the struggling writer had been trying to develop an affordable way to print his latest play, having fallen into debt printing an earlier one. Until then, he had etched the words into the limestone, a laborious process. Later, as he was about to wipe the stone clean, something stopped him. Drawing on his knowledge of chemistry, he decided to cover it in a diluted mixture of nitric acid and then in printing ink.

The stone retained the printing ink only where the greasy pencil had been applied, repelling it elsewhere, so that the words emerged. Elated, Senefelder placed a sheet of paper on to the stone, applying pressure with an improvised press and produced the very first lithographic print. He refined the technique over several days, thrilled he had invented something that “had occurred to nobody before me”.

Lithography, from the ancient Greek lithos (“stone”) and graphein (“to write”), became a popular medium in the 19th century, employed for commercial, artistic and political purposes. The grain of the limestone mimicked that of paper, allowing for far greater precision than previous printing methods. Napoleon was an early adopter, instructing his army to have transfer paper and portable presses brought to the battlefields so that artist-reporters could dispatch news of his successes.

Artists too were drawn to the new medium, including Francisco Goya in the 1820s and Edgar Degas and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec in the latter part of the century. By then, the new bourgeoisie wanted affordable art to hang in their homes, and lithography — faster than woodcut printing, cheaper than chalcography — provided a solution. It was also used for letterheads, bank cheques, diplomas, business cards, menus, city maps, calligraphy textbooks and advertising.

Litografia Bulla is the world’s oldest surviving lithography workshop, tucked away on the ground floor of an 18th-century building on a quiet, cobbled street in Campo Marzio, central Rome. More than 200 years after it opened, the Bulla family still runs it and the techniques they use are virtually unchanged. Since the 1940s, they have worked with celebrated artists including Giorgio de Chirico, Lucio Fontana, Jannis Kounellis, Ana Mendieta and Cy Twombly. The story of their family business is also the story of an artistic medium, one that began as a form of mass communication and grew into a tool for cutting-edge experimentation in tandem with Rome’s own emergence as a hub for contemporary art.

Litografia Bulla’s roots go back to France in 1818, when the entrepreneurial Francesco (later François) Bulla moved with his family from Canton Ticino, in present-day Switzerland, to Paris. There, he founded a lithography studio on one of the city’s liveliest streets, rue Saint-Jacques, and quickly made a name for himself working with publishing houses and satirical journals. François also collaborated with artists including the illustrator known as Grandville, creating his book of zoomorphic cartoons Les Métamorphoses du jour, an instant sensation said to have influenced Walt Disney a century later.

No one really knows why François’ nephew Anselmo Bulla chose to leave Paris in 1840 and move to Rome, presses and lithography stones in tow, but archival records suggest that working with the Vatican, which became a major client, was a motivating factor. (Another branch of the family remained in Paris, but there are no records of the studio after the 1890s.)

In the early days in Rome, “the workshop was next to the countryside surrounding the Vatican”, said Flaminia Bulla, 33, a descendant of François, when I visited for the first time on a crisp December evening last year. (In 2020, she and her sister took over the running of the business from their father Romolo and aunt Rosalba, two revered master printers in their day.) Far from looking out on rolling fields, 2 Via del Vantaggio is now in the heart of the city, a stone’s throw from Piazza del Popolo and a short walk from Piazza di Spagna.

Set in an elegant four-storey building still owned by the family, one might mistake the Litografia for an antiques shop, or perhaps an artist’s studio, but it is neither. The foyer and exhibition space, the only rooms open to visitors, are layered with history. “The wallpaper is the same one Anselmo found when he came here in 1840,” Beatrice said, indicating the faded dark-green fleur de lis pattern. “We’re really talking about a piece of history which, luckily, no one has wanted to erase.” The workshop is littered with paintings, lithography stones, sculptures and prints, as well as antique furniture, trinkets and small printing presses. “Like all artisans, our dad and our aunt [are] serial hoarders,” she explained, laughing.

A library of thick rectangular lithography stones of varying sizes occupies a back wall. They are more than 200 years old — the same ones brought from Paris — and are still used today. The stones were quarried from Solnhofen in Bavaria, famed for its Jurassic era limestone, a material that lends itself to lithography as it is hard but porous.

“These stones were a bit like a safety deposit box,” Beatrice said. “You would rent a stone and you would call and say, ‘I’m number xx, my business cards are running out, can you print 200 more copies?’” Otherwise, once a print run was complete, the stones were commonly returned to their “virgin state” by manually sanding them down with a pumice stone and silicon powder. Beatrice opened a door leading to a small inner courtyard where they sand down and prep the stones. “With artists,” she said, “it is our absolute duty to erase the drawing for copyright reasons. You print the edition, they sign it and then you erase the stone.”

The sisters had not planned to go into the family business. Beatrice spent five years in London, where she got a degree from Middlesex University and worked in fashion. Flaminia got a masters from the University of Bologna and also spent time in London. “Like all the things that are dear to you, you don’t even realise how special they are,” Beatrice told me. “We had the fortune of growing up here, on the first floor, and every once in a while during the afternoons, we would come here to spend some time with our dad. We’d sit with the artists and watch in silence.”

They returned home in 2017 to help curate an exhibition to mark the Litografia’s bicentenary at the National Institute for Graphic Design in Rome. As part of this process, they sifted through the workshop’s archives, discovering more of their family’s history.

During the Litografia’s early days in Rome, Anselmo maintained an impressive network of clients, including the newspaper Fanfulla and the Vatican, for which he produced cheques for the Papal States bank and borders for religious sermons. He also printed detailed city maps, diplomas, manuals and textbooks for a range of clients across Italy.

The advent of coloured “chromolithography” in the 1850s cemented the medium as the main means of mass communication. Suddenly postcards and posters for consumer products, events and exhibitions were everywhere, and business was booming at the Litografia. In the early 20th century, they also began producing film posters for two major film studios, Gaumont and Cines, some of which are on display in the exhibition room.

Beatrice showed me a frayed album of sample prints from around this time, when their great-grandfather Romolo (after whom their father was named) took over the workshop following his father Anselmo’s death in 1891. The album served as a catalogue for prospective clients, but it also records the changes that took place in Italy over a hundred years, including the adoption of a standardised state-school system and the advent of entertainment and advertising. There are labels for wines and champagnes, biscuits and honey, wedding invitations, business cards, an 1897 poster advertising a new railway line from Sulmona to Isernia. As we leafed through the book, a framed portrait of Romolo Bulla Sr watched over us sternly, high up on the wall.

Romolo Sr was, by all accounts, a difficult man. His main passions in life were hunting and dogs, and he passed on the skills of the family trade by means of exacting punishment. He would tie his son Roberto to a desk and “make him practise that beautiful English calligraphy in reverse while he went hunting. Each mistake was a lashing,” Roberto’s son Romolo, the sisters’ father, told me. He shook his head. “Those were different times.”

In 1941, Roberto finished his military service and came back to the workshop, which had been temporarily closed. He hid five partigiani (Italian resistance fighters) there, sneaking them food through a backdoor out of sight of the fascist barracks that occupied the building opposite.

As well as the war, Roberto was contending with the waning demand for traditional lithography, which took a hit both from the invention of photography and the widespread use of the much faster offset printing. He decided to take the business in a new direction and work mostly with contemporary artists, many of whom were arriving in Rome from all over the country, fleeing the aftermath of war.

Roberto worked with many of the greats of modern art. They would come to the workshop and draw directly on to the stones, which he would then prep, cover with just the right amount of ink and print in limited editions, the artisan acting as the artist’s right hand. “De Chirico would walk to the Litografia once a week, stopping en route at Bar D’Angelo to buy two mont blanc pastries,” Romolo recalled, “and then he would eat them here so his wife wouldn’t see him.”

Romolo started working at the Litografia when he was 14. “My father wouldn’t tell me anything [about the printing process], he would just say, ‘steal with your eyes’,” Romolo said. “But I would trick him because I would walk his colleague, who was a great printer, Iginio Alessandrini, home to Borgo Vittorio every day, offer him a coffee and he would tell me everything that had happened that day, all the various techniques.”

From the 1950s to the late 1970s, Italy underwent a period of economic growth that transformed it from a poor rural nation into a global industrial power. And though Rome could not compete with New York as the centre of the art world, it was still seen as an essential pit-stop for the aspiring artist, going back to the days of the Grand Tour. Artists and writers flocked to the area around Piazza del Popolo and the art galleries La Tartaruga and La Salita, which exhibited seminal American artists like Robert Rauschenberg and Richard Serra, as well as emerging names including Pino Pascali and Jannis Kounellis.

Romolo and Rosalba, then in their twenties, began to spend more time in this world, drinking at the wine bar Buccone and bringing artist friends back to the Litografia to experiment with new techniques. It became a focal point for artists, including those passing through Rome who recognised in the Bullas ideal collaborators whom they could entrust with their vision. One such artist was the Cuban-American Ana Mendieta, who was awarded the prestigious Rome Prize in 1983 and had come for a residency at the American Academy with her partner Carl Andre. The couple became fast friends with Romolo and, together with Rosalba, they created the book Pietre/Foglie (1984), which juxtaposed Andre’s grids with Mendieta’s plant rubbings.

Another artist who returned repeatedly to the Litografia was the American Jim Dine. “I’ve met a lot of lithographers in my life,” he said in 2001, “but the Bullas are something very special as printers. The stone seems like a living thing. They’re accurate without being fanatics or scientists. You feel it in their hands, they are artisans.” He added that Rosalba Bulla “[understood] colour and [made] something magic with the colour”.

Then, as now, the colours for printing were all made in situ, recorded on strips of paper which still hang on the walls. On my second visit to the workshop, I spotted Kounellis’s strip, the bright colours — yellow, blue and magenta — perfectly preserved. “Have you ever seen these colours in Kounellis’s work?” Beatrice asked me with a mixture of excitement and incredulity, referring to the artist’s penchant for black.

Today, Rome is coming into its own again as a centre for contemporary art, having been overtaken by Milan and Turin in recent decades and overshadowed by artistic hubs like London, Berlin and Athens. It is now home to a burgeoning scene of independent galleries and artist-run spaces. The day I first visited the workshop back in December, I was feeling buoyant after having attended three great exhibition openings. At the Litografia, a solo show of prints by the Italian mixed-media artist Elisabetta Benassi was on view. The works were made by inking and printing the backs of five lithographic stones, a piece of linoleum and a brick, all previously used by artists who had worked with the Bullas, including de Chirico, Dine and Kounellis.

The Bullas are something very special as printers . . . They’re accurate without being fanatics or scientists. You feel it in their hands, they are artisans

The exhibition, which has since travelled to New York, was the result of a residency programme conceived by Flaminia and Beatrice. Since they took over the business, they have sought to open the workshop to a broader audience; the exhibition space was their initiative. They work closely with museums, galleries, international art academies and the Rome University of Fine Arts. Every week, they teach lithography to a group of students at the workshop.

“With my father, many people would come to drink wine, but now they come to see the shows,” Romolo told me with paternal pride. He recently went to an exhibition opening in Rome, he continued, where “everyone ran up to the girls saying, ‘Here come the Bullette, here come the Bullette!’”

After a succession of men, two young women now run the family business. “Our aunt [Rosalba] really had to fight to stay here at the beginning. It simply wasn’t even contemplated that a woman could take on the baton,” Beatrice said. Tradition dictated that the eldest son be the heir to the workshop, but Romolo ran it alongside his sister as equal partners. “In fact, if our grandfather saw us now, two women in the studio . . . !” she trailed off, laughing.

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